Uber supporters rally outside Birmingham City Hall, meet with council president

About a dozen supporters of ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft gathered in front of Birmingham City Hall Friday to encourage the city council to bring the companies to Birmingham.

They were joined by City Council President Johnathan Austin, who took questions and said yes, he does want the ridesharing companies to come to Birmingham.

"They'll be here. They'll be here sooner than you think," Austin told them. "The Birmingham City Council wants Uber."

There are still gaps between what the city wants and what Uber wants, though, and those who gathered at Linn Park expressed their concerns.

"Millennials, young people in Birmingham, aren't being represented," Thomas Reid said.

Reid questioned one of the sticking points in the debate, the city's requirement that ridesharing companies' drivers carry commercial liability insurance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most drivers in these systems don't drive for them full-time, and they should be able to be covered by their personal auto insurance when they aren't driving for the company, he said.

Charles Kessler, the party secretary of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, who organized the event, said the free market, not city regulations, should dictate whether ridesharing companies succeed or fail in Birmingham.

"We want people to be able to start businesses without being suffocated by the city council or others here in Birmingham," Kessler said. "Uber doesn't operate within the Wild West. They very much take care of their customers. They use the laws of supply and demand."

Art Carden, an associate professor of economics at Samford University, said Uber would provide competition that would improve service for every transportation option in Birmingham, including taxis.

The current taxi system, Carden said, can often give visitors a bad first impression of Birmingham.

Carden booked a taxi through an app from the Westin hotel in uptown to Linn Park for the rally. He said it picked him up 12 minutes late.

Carden said regulating Uber, Lyft or other ridesharing companies by the same system as taxi companies -- such as forcing them to charge the same rates as taxis -- would limit their ability to succeed in the market.

"This makes Uber and Lyft not viable by basically regulating them as taxis," he said.

Austin said Uber is welcome to come to Birmingham, as long as they abide by the same rules for other transportation-for-hire companies.

"There is nothing keeping Uber from coming here right now," he said. "What we want is for Uber to come here."

Austin said he uses Uber when he travels, and he knows many other council members use Uber also.

"Uber is a different transit option, and we want to be able to provide as many transit options to our citizens as well as those who are visiting our city as we can," he said. "The way to do that is to bring Uber in, bring other on-demand services like that in, that would benefit our city. That's what I want to do."

Austin said he's talked to representatives from Uber, but the company hasn't formally come forward and asked for a license to operate in Birmingham.

"Uber has not come to us and said this is what we want, this is how we want to do it," he said. "They haven't come to us and made an application."

"We welcome the opportunity to talk through our existing safety mechanisms in place like background checks on all driver-partners and insurance coverage on all trips, and why they make sense for ridesharing's business model," the representative said.

City leaders want more transit options, Austin said.

"We're prepared to do whatever we need to do to make sure that Uber is in the city of Birmingham," he said. "The next step is they should call me."